or instant with powdered creamer and Sweet'n
Low at the desk. In the past decade or so, how
ever, America's morning rite of caffeine con
sumption has moved decidedly upscale. A flood
of new coffee shops has turned the 75-cent
cup of perked joe, refills free, into a six-dollar
extravaganza brewed and blended expressly for
each customer by a personal barista.
"We have built a whole new ritual of coffee
in this country," says Howard Schultz, the man
who invented Starbucks. In two decades Schultz
turned a single espresso bar in a coffee shop at
the corner of Fourth and Spring in Seattle into
a Fortune 500 company, building a global icon
so familiar that Playboyhas done a feature on
the "Women of Starbucks." A five-cup-a-day
coffee drinker himself, the 51-year-old Schultz
is a picture of intensity as he prowls his office
and recalls how it all began.
Schultz was a coffee bean salesman for a Seat
tle coffee bean store named Starbucks-after the
first mate in Melville's Moby Dick-when he
visited Milan in 1983 and fell in love with
the ambience of that great Italian institution,
the espresso bar. "It was about excellent coffee,
but it was more than that," he says in passion
ate tones. "It was about conversation. About
community. About human connection. And fine
coffee was the link. I thought, You know, we
could do this in Seattle."
On a drizzly (what else?) Seattle morning in
April 1984, Schultz set up a tiny espresso bar in
the rear corner of the coffee bean store, offer
ing mysterious beverages like caffe latte that the
likes of Dunkin' Donuts had never dreamed of.
offee worldwide, but it's largely a
Within days there were long lines on the side
walk outside, and Howard Schultz never looked
back. He soon left the company and opened his
own espresso bar, called II Giornale, or The
Daily. Two years later he bought out his former
employer, and now there are more than 8,500
Starbucks around the world, with another 1,500
scheduled to open this year.
Schultz doesn't like to emphasize the role
caffeine may play in his company's success: "I
don't think it's the caffeine. I think the ritual, the
romance of the thing, is really more important."
But the caffeine is there. A few miles down the
interstate from Schultz's office, at the Starbucks
CAFFEINE 31